Before presenting my position about animal consciousness, I might define fist what consciousness or awareness meant for me. Consciousness rather than merely mean the state of not being asleep it is the basic ability of an organism to perceive and consequently respond to selected features of their environment. However, as we might notice throughout the semester, there are two senses of consciousness that causes controversy when applied to animals: phenomenal consciousness, and self-consciousness.
The phenomenal consciousness refers to the subjective, experiential, or phenomenological aspects of conscious experience, which have been argued to be more likely in mammals and birds than it is in invertebrates. Furthermore, the self-consciousness refers to the capacity of an organism own mental states. The capacity of self consciousness is related to the theory of mind in animals commonly regarded as manageable by empirical means. The theory of mind is defined as being able to reflect on the contents of one’s own and other’s minds, or to being able to infer the full range of mental states that cause action.
Now, animal consciousness is a topic of controversy because as animals lack the ability to express themselves through human language, cannot tell us about their experience, and we are unable to know whether they have minds due to we can only observe their behaviors which is not sufficient to guarantee the presence of mentality on them.
On the same way, it is difficult to know whether they have consciousness because we as human often denied it and imply that animals do not feel, and that harming them is not wrong. Rene Descartes, a French philosopher from the 17th century stated that only humans are conscious.
Most of the pas...
... middle of paper ...
...n, convergent evidence indicates that animals have neuroanatomical, neurochemical,a nd neurophysiological substrates of consciousness stets together with the ability to show intentional behaviors. Therefore, humans are not the only one in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.
References
Allen, Collin, “Animal Consciousness”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zata (ed.), URL =
Edelman, D. B., & Seth, A. K. (2009). Animal consciousness: A synthetic approach. Trends in Neurosciences, 32(9), 476-484. doi:10.1016/j.tins.2009.05.008
Panksepp, J. (2005). Affective consciousness: Core emotional feelings in animals and humans. Consciousness and Cognition: An International Journal, 14(1), 30-80. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2004.10.004
Have you ever wondered how animals interact and work together to get a job done? Many times, animals put their minds together to complete a task. But what many people do not realize is that animals interact with one another just as humans would. In many instances, people don’t realize the amount of intelligence and common sense that animals, such as the elephant, possess. The study of elephant’s thoughts and thinking were explained and backed up through three different mediums. This information was explained through articles, videos, and passages. Combined, these pieces of work clarified what the experiment was, what it was testing, the purpose behind it, and how the different pieces were
Neuroscientists claim that due to unconscious brain activity, we are “biochemical puppets” (Nahmias). Through experiments conducted by neuroscientists like Itzhak Fried, neural activity is shown to occur before a conscious decision is made. Fried concluded that this was a predetermined occurrence
Chapter 4 discusses the several states of consciousness: the nature of consciousness, sleep and dreams, psychoactive drugs, hypnosis, and meditation. Consciousness is a crucial part of human experience, it represents that private inner mind where we think, feel, plan, wish, pray, omagine, and quietly relive experiences. William James described the mind as a stream of consciousness, a continuous flow of changing sensations, images thoughts, and feelings. Consciousness has two major parts: awareness and arousal. Awareness includes the awareness of the self and thoughts about one's experiences. Arousal is the physiological state of being engaged with the environment. Theory of mind refers to individuals understanding that they and others think,
Another one of Descartes arguments supporting the separation of humans and animals is that if machines were created to resemble and act like animals, there is no way we would be able to tell them from the real thing. Unlike the animals though, a machine created to resemble a human could never pass off as real. According to Descartes, it would be impossible to get the machine to react to other humans in an appropriate way. Human conversations are too complicated for machines to understand and interact properly without flaw. This is what separates humans from animals. Even the dumbest ma...
In order to do so, I shall be looking at different sources and reviewing various definitions and interpretations of consciousness and distinguishing the methods approached to the study of the topic in the way it is measured.
In this term paper, I have tried to tackle the metaphysical issues of consciousness by first defining consciousness and doing a thorough study about the term. Then I proceeded to the metaphysical aspects of consciousness, examining and understanding them.
I will commence by defining what makes a mental state conscious. This will be done aiming to distinguish what type of state we are addressing when we speak of a mental phenomenon and how is it, that can have a plausible explanation. By taking this first approach, we are able to build a base for our main argument to be clear enough and so that we can remain committed to.
Renner, T., Feldman, R., Majors, M., Morrissey, J., & Mae, L. (2011). States of Consciousness. Psychsmart (pp. 99-107). New York: McGraw-Hill.
[4] Guven Guzeldere (1995) 'Consciousness: What it is & how to study it' Journal of Consciousness Studies vol.2, no.1; pp. 30-51
In 1977 Irene Pepperberg, a recent graduate of Harvard University, did something very bold. At a time when animals still were considered automatons, she set out to find what was on another creature’s mind by talking to it. She brought a one-year-old African gray parrot she named Alex into her lab to teach him to reproduce the sounds of the English language. “I thought if he learned to communicate, I could ask him questions about how he sees the world.”
“... the right question for animals is not ‘Can they reason?’ ‘Can they talk?’, but ‘Can they suffer?’ ”
"Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness." Encyclopedia of Consciousness. Oxford: Elsevier Science & Technology, 2009. Credo Reference. Web. 26 April 2011.
It is nearly impossible to say whether non-human animals are intelligent. Most studies, in this field of psychology, were carried out on primates, and it is thought that these animals are naturally superior. It seems most behaviour in the research discussed in this essay can be explained through association learning, therefore not actually a result of intelligence. It is difficult to falsify whether animals are intelligent or not because, although they are able to solve problems they only show some aspects to suggest ToM.
“Consciousness is defined as everything of which we are aware at any given time - our thoughts, feelings, sensations, and perceptions of the external environment. Physiological researchers have returned to the study of consciousness, in examining physiological rhythms, sleep, and altered states of consciousness (changes in awareness produced by sleep, meditation, hypnosis, and drugs)” (Wood, 2011, 169). There are five levels of consciousness; Conscious (sensing, perceiving, and choosing), Preconscious (memories that we can access), Unconscious ( memories that we can not access), Non-conscious ( bodily functions without sensation), and Subconscious ( “inner child,” self image formed in early childhood).
Animals can be perceived in many different ways. While some humans consider animals to be mindless machines programmed with instinct, others view them as spiritual creatures capable of coherent thought and emotions. I feel that animals are somewhere in the middle. Although they rely heavily on instinct, the ability to feel emotions shows that their mental capacity is not far from that of a human.